Delivery Stork

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Calvin: Dad, where do babies come from? Is it true a stork leaves them swaddled in a bundle on the front step? Calvin's dad: In most cases, yes, but you were unceremoniously dumped down the chimney by a big, hairy pterodactyl.

For many years, when a kid whose parents don't think they're ready for The Talk asked the question "Where do babies come from?", a common answer was "the stork".

For those wondering exactly how storks became associated with pregnancy: The tradition apparently started in Victorian Britain. The White Stork was considered a symbol of happiness, fertility, and prosperity. Storks were known to nest on chimney tops in England, so the mythology of storks dropping baby humans down the chimney was made quite quickly. (It must also be mentioned that the surgical masks worn by early gynecologists gave them a vaguely storklike face. Best not to think about that too hard...)

Examples:

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Advertising

An ad for birth control has one of these walk up to a woman, who dismisses it with a gesture and walks off to consider vacations, new houses, and other options she can pursue because she's not pregnant.

A 2000 March of Dimes commercial promoting pre-conceptual nutrition and self-care, featured a stork wandering through an office building, with various female employees trying to hide from, shun, or attract the bird according to their respective wants. watch here.

A cartoon stork with a Groucho Marx voice is a long-time pitchman for Vlasic brand pickles (working off the theme of pregnant women's craving for pickles).

A number of Hallmark's new baby and baby's first Christmas ornaments have incorporated this theme.

Anime & Manga

Cited in The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service as the reasoning behind the business's name: instead of the white stork that brings new life, they're the black heron ("kurosagi" = "black heron") that takes away the dead.

Flying delivery storks are a running gag. These have generally replaced aircraft in the background sky, and sound like them too.

In the same series there is a chapter based around white lies, in which Kafuka suggests changing white lies into reality. After Chiri overhears Majiru being told that a stork delivers babies, a news report about a stork literally delivering a missing baby is broadcasted.

The Code Geass parody comic "Legend of the Power Couple" (from the gag comic compilation Queen volume 1) has Suzaku and Euphemia believe in this as Character ExaggerationPlayed for Laughs. Suzaku believes in the Delivery Stork, while Euphemia believes that babies come from cabbage patches, and Lelouch, standing nearby, has a look on his face that's the non-verbal version of a Flat "What.". Which gets even flatter and what-ier when they hop in the Lancelot to search cabbage patches and stork habitats for babies.

In the Sword Art Online, DVD commentary "Sword Art Offline", Yui asks how human babies are made. To get out of telling her the real truth, Kirito gives the stork explanation.

Comic Books

In Brazilian comic Penadinho (known in English as Bug-a-booo), along with the comedic Grim Reaper, Dona Morte (known in English as Lady McDeath), there is a Stork who leads the reincarnation sector.

Astérix and Son shows that Obelix still believes this trope. At the beginning, he mentions a (slightly prophetic) dream that a stork dropped a baby off on his and Asterix's doorstep. Much to his mild (and Asterix's not so mild) surprise, there really is a baby on the doorstep!

In issue 12 of Urbanus, Urbanus is bribed into marriage because he presumably impregnated a girl. Not understanding where babies come from, he panicks when he sees a truck with cabbages and blows it up. Then he spots a stork, and promptly beats it up. When he gets home, there is an entire swarm of storks, and he shoots at them with a cannon. Loaded with cabbages.

In Lupo Alberto (set in a World of Funny Animals) the character Umperio is a stork out of job, and often torments Alberto and Marta because they're his only hope. He once tried to change his job, but delivering pizzas the same way he delivered children got him fired due to every single customer running at the sight of him, and he will not paint himself pink to pass himself off as a flamingo and get a job as a dancer in a nightclub (a relative of his did it, and it didn't end well).

In the Zipi y Zape story El tonel del tiempo ("The barrel of time"), the twins use the titular barrel to time-travel to the day they were born. They come out of the barrel as babies, with the stork holding both of them... and have to pull off one of their shenanigans to prevent their own delivery from suffering a last-minute change of destination.

An article from several decades back compared sexual knowledge among youth of different generations. In the '50s, they show a whitebread kid talking with a greaser.

Whitebread: But I thought the stork just brought the baby. Greaser: Man, ain't you ever heard of sex? First, the man *whisper*, then the woman *whisper*, and then the two of them *whisper*. Whitebread: Then what? Greaser:Then the stork brings the baby.

A Don Martin cartoon has a couple of kids pondering the situation. One says "Charlie says the Stork brought us." The other shrugs "Ecch, Charlie, what does he know!" — then they both say "Hi, Charlie!" to a kid walking by with long skinny legs and neck, and a long pointy nose.

One strip features Calvin hearing about and asking his father specifically about the stork. His father's response was that, yes, most babies were delivered by a stork, but Calvin was "unceremoniously dumped down the chimney by a big, hairy pterodactyl." Calvin is, needless to say, thrilled (to his father's lack of surprise).

In another comic, Calvin's dad informs him that kids come in kits (some assembly required) from Sears. Calvin is upset by this, but his father tells him not to worry as he was "a blue light special at K-mart. Almost as good, and a lot cheaper." Calvin is less than thrilled.

When Mafalda's mother warns her that a brother is coming, the children discuss a lot about the stork, including the fact that airplane delivery would be quicker.

In a later strip, Gus, the above little brother, comes across a very fat man at the beach: he pats him on the stomach and asks if there's a little stork on the way.

In Hägar the Horrible, Hamlet asks his mother The Question. She answers that the stork brought him. He wants to know about his big sister, and Helga gives the same answer. Then he asks about his dad, and Helga says: "Four big storks."

In Krazy Kat, Coconino County has its resident baby-deliverer Joe Stork, who lives atop the Enchanted Mesa. He is older than all the strip's main characters, having delivered them as babies. In a running gag, characters struggle to fend off his deliveries; apparently, any two characters in a romantic relationship run the risk of getting a bundle dropped on them, which may in part account for the strip's lack of clear gender (one strip has Krazy loudly "breaking up" with Ignatz as the stork walks by for fear that he may take their relationship the wrong way).

Parodied in a Nemi strip. The father of the kid she babysits pays her to tell his son about the birds and the bees, and she sits him down and tells him various facts about birds and bees.

Fan Works

Empath: The Luckiest Smurf purposely subverts this trope by stating that the Smurfs in the series reproduce physically. A stork does appear in the series to deliver Baby Smurf, but it is revealed that Baby Smurf came from Smurfling Island, and from parents on the island where nobody ages. In-universe, it's suggested that Peyo must have Bowdlerized the account when he created The Smurfs after getting his hands on the memory crystal that was given to him.

As part of exaggerating her naivete, Ruby in React Watch Believe Yikes still believes in this. And her interpretation of abortion is the stork being shot. Yang promises to set her straight at some point.

Films — Animation

The 1941 Disney film Dumbo starts out with storks delivering baby animals to their mothers while their circus is headquartered in Florida for the winter. The babies have no (visible) fathers except for the tiger cubs.

In the Pixar short that accompanied Up, Partly Cloudy, this trope was used, and the question as to where the storks obtained the babies they delivered was answered. The stork the short focuses on has the bad luck to work with a storm cloud who only makes dangerous animals. They're good friends, but the friendship gets really strained after the cloud makes a porcupine. And then Mr. Stormcloud shows off his (unfinished) shark... and the stork flies off to another cloud, only to return with a set of football armor, ready for more.

In another Pixar film, Cars, judging by a painting on one of the courtroom's walls, it's implied that cars and other vehicles reproduce by getting baby cars that roll down to Earth on a golden highway coming from an ivory and gold factory in Heaven.

Disney's Dinosaur actually did this with a Pteranodon who apparently found Aladar's egg floating in a river after an Oviraptor accidentally dropped it while stealing it from Aladar's biological mother.

In Storks, after delivery storks decide on doing a less difficult job, they wind up going into the online delivery business. Part of what motivated the storks into giving up the job was a stork going rogue and trying to keep a baby, which led to the homing beacon being destroyed. The plot revolves around what happens when the girl they've been forced to raise and the stork supposed to fire her accidentally reactivates the old Baby Making Machine and have to get a new baby girl to her home. The storks have also updated their delivery mechanisms and do pods rather than swaddles. Events ultimately lead to them going back to their original mission of baby delivery, complete with the classic swaddles.

Films — Live-Action

The Spanish film Adiós, Cigüeña, Adiós (1971) (which means "Goodbye, Stork, Goodbye") is all about a gang of Spanish children stoutly defying this trope by working out the facts of life for themselves as they help their friends Arturo and Paloma through their Teen Pregnancy. At various points in the movie, several of them express their irritation at adults for thinking they'd actually fall for the old myth about storks bringing babies.

There's also a strange (even for him!) Dr. Seuss book and film entitled The Hoober-Bloob Highway in which new babies are sent from space down a magical spiral-shaped highway. Before they're sent down, a creature named Hoober-Bloob lets them choose what species they want to be born as, where they'd like to grow up, and then gives them a briefing to prepare them for life. This is undoubtly the most convoluted fictional answer to the question "Where do babies come from?"

Jasper: So they call together all the great scientists, all the philosophers and thinkers, to ask the big question: why can't women have babies anymore? And all through the talk, there's one man in the corner who says nothing, just eats his dinner in a very loud fashion. And eventually the speakers get tired of the sound of his chewing, so they ask him from the podium, "If you deserve to be here, what do you think the answer is?" And he looks up, and says, "I don't know. But this stork is delicious!"

The "Every Sperm Is Sacred" scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life starts with a stork dropping a baby down the chimney. Inside the house, it then falls out from under the mother's skirt. The beleaguered woman just glances up and asks one of the dozens of kids to pick it up.

Parodied in Addams Family Values. When Morticia is having a baby, one of the other kids in the waiting room with Wednesday and Pugsley claims their new sibling came from some bizarre amalgamation of the stork and seemingly every other baby euphemism in existence. Pugsley tells her, "Our parents are having a baby too." Wednesday then deadpans, complete with dramatic zoom-in, "They had sex."

Literature

In Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, babies really are brought by the stork, though thanks to something called the Adult Conspiracy, the parents still have to "summon the stork" (i.e. have sex. Sigh.) This only seems to apply to humanoids; centaurs apparently have offspring the mundane way, but they don't talk about it, and we're glad to comply. One villain is said (though possibly just rumored) to have proven too foul for the stork to handle; a basilisk is said to have delivered him.

Spoofed in the book Open Sesame by Tom Holt, in which a fairyland "family planning" division works by shooting storks out of the air while they're delivering.

The Doctor WhoEighth Doctor Adventures novel The Crooked World takes place on a planet that's like a children's cartoon. They have no concept of sex, and Fitz (who's a little bit of a Lovable Sex Maniac) takes it upon himself to try explaining to the Girl of the Week. She only understands it in terms of making babies, which is done on this planet by writing a letter to the stork, and gets confused by his explanation and even more confused when Anji tries to explain his explanation, and decides Fitz would probably appreciate it if she wrote to the stork. He gets kidnapped and the stork has a devil of a time trying to find him, and by the time it finds him, it has dropped the baby into the jungle to be raised by friendly wolves and ends up delivering him a bomb instead, which he seems about as (un)happy about as he would have been about a baby. One of the villains who has kidnapped him comments, when the "baby" is dropped into his lap, that if he'd written to the stork in French, the stork wouldn't have known what he meant and wouldn't have delivered it.note In case you're not up on your outdated euphemisms, a "French letter" means a condom.

In the Novelization of The Twin Dilemma, the Sixth Doctor, temporarily under the delusion he's Sherlock Holmes, claims that as a child his parents told him the stork delivered babies, but he found this hard to believe as babies were common in London, but storks were rare. Upon hearing that a neighbour was about to have a baby, he observed the house closely, and didn't see a single stork. He did see a doctor entering with a black bag; obviously he had brought the baby.

Pat of Silver Bush, (by the author of Anne of Green Gables) features Judy spinning a homegrown yarn to Pat: Judy says she's going to find Pat's little brother or sister in the parsley bed.

The Anne of Green Gables books contain a reference to the stork, too. It was used as a euphemism for the birth of Anne's son, Jem. It was a bit oddly placed, since Anne had already given birth — albeit prematurely and the baby did not survive — and though it wasn't gory, it was plainly written.

Referenced in Judy Blume's Superfudge, where Peter's grandmother is dismayed that his parents told four-year-old Fudge the truth about how the baby got inside Mommy's belly. In her day, this trope was the standard Lie To Children.

Parodied in "The Parenting Storks," a short story from David Sedaris' Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, with a stork who believes that baby storks are put into eggs by mice with magic pockets.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Dill tells Scout that you get babies from an island where they are gathered like flowers. Scout, who had previously been told that babies are dropped down the chimney by God, is skeptical.

In the short story The Conjure Brother, the young girl protagonist rejects the idea that babies come from storks. Instead she believes her friend's theory, that to get a baby a mother must eat until she becomes extremely fat. Then she goes the hospital to lose the weight and from there she can choose a baby.

On the cover of the Choose Your Own Nightmare book The Haunted Baby, the eponymous character is being carried by a raven instead of a stork.

Averted in one of James Thurber's Fables for Our Time, in which a stork tells his wife that the reason he's out all night is that he has to deliver human babies. (He's really out partying.) She finds out that it isn't true and greets him with Hello, phony obstetrician! and crowns him with a chimney brick.

Live-Action TV

A first-season Mad TV sketch involved a couple going to a fertility clinic but not understanding what sex was. Turns out they "prayed to the magical stork." They were quite disgusted to learn the truth.

An early Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode has Buffy and Xander discovering Giles anxiously rehearsing asking Jenny out on a date, and proceed to give him unsolicited advice. Xander tells him "That business with the stork? It's just a smokescreen!" - Giles glares.

In the Glee episode "Sexy", Brittany thinks she's pregnant because a stork built its nest on top of her garage.

Discussed in House. When House posits that the patient might have two diseases, his team counters that one is simpler. To illustrate the point that one is not always simpler than two, House asks "what if I showed you a baby and told you that it's the product of either two parents or one stork?"

One The Whitest Kids U' Know sketch is about the other side of this — apparently, the storks get the babies from a literal baby factory in the clouds (complete with what appears to be a moving assembly line, although the sketch only shows the final stop, at the guy who takes the babies from the line as they come in, hands it to the waiting stork, and tells the bird where to fly).

This might be referring to an episode of The Cosby Show, when Cliff took new step-granddaughter Olivia to see his office. When she asked him what he did, he explained that he was a doctor who delivered babies. Olivia cemented her Scrappy status by proceeding to tell a grown man that "no you don't" and giving him a lecture on how the stork does all that, insisting that he gets the babies from "heaven", and that "they're all in a line", acting increasingly exasperated with him for not knowing all this.

On Adam Ruins Everything, one of these (a parody of the Vlasic pickles mascot) appears to Emily (who has already had her baby), and hands her a black rock painted with the words "Postpartum Depression." He also hands one to Murph, explaining that men can get PPD as well.

Used as a joke in an uncut episode of Friends. It is in an episode (8-15) where Monica does not want to watch a birthing video with Rachel, because Monica already freaked out over the footage. When Rachel remarks that Monica also wants to have kids, Monica answers: "I do. But... the stork is gonna bring mine..."

Theater

In Once Upon a Mattress, the King gives The Talk to the Prince entirely in mime, but despite his best efforts, his son doesn't quite get it, and so, in the end he makes motions suggesting a stork. The Prince, however, finally puts it all together and realizes that "it isn't the stork at all."

In Spring Awakening (which takes place in 19th century Germany) Frau Bergmann is still trying to use this story with fourteen-year-old Wendlanote sixteen in The Musical, who becomes frustrated and insists her mother finally explain to her what really happens. She doesn't, and this ends very, VERY badly.

A reference to this is made in the 1776 song "But Mr. Adams", mostly because 'stork' rhymes with 'New York' and the New York delegate is the one singing:

Livingston: I've been presented with a new son by the noble stork/So I am going home to celebrate and pop the cork/With all the Livingstons together back in old New York.

Video Games

Alien Nations (known in some locales as Aliens & Amazons) is facetiously based on an interstellar version of this trope: in the first game, we're shown that the reason three very different sentient species share the same planet is because the storks who were tasked with delivering them to their respective worlds stopped off at a bar while they were supposed to be on the job.

The set-up for Yoshi's Island involves an attempted kidnapping of Baby Mario and Baby Luigi while they're being delivered by the stork. The stork is knocked out mid-flight by Kamek, kidnapping Baby Luigi, while the Yoshis find Baby Mario and vow to start a relay team to reunite the brothers. Yoshi's Island DS also uses the stork part, except it adds a few things such as a stop sign called a 'Stork Stop' where the stork allows Yoshi to switch which baby he's carrying on his back, storks carrying the babies back home after being rescued from Bowser's Castle and the stork itself in various cut scenes. Yoshi's New Island has the stork accidentally bring Mario and Luigi to the wrong house, then get literally beaten up by Kamek mid flight.

A stork delivery service representative is on the phone, taking complaints from a woman who hadn't received her baby. While he defends the reliability of his delivery storks, a glance at the line behind him shows a vulture in uniform amongst the storks.

Inverted with SCP-918, an abandoned mill that creates storks that steal infants and turns them into talcum powder.

Western Animation

Looney Tunes has featured storks delivering babies in dozens of cartoons:

The 1933 short Shuffle Off To Buffalo uses a stork delivery factory as the setting. Ethnic stereotypes abound, including a Jewish baby who's stamped "Kosher for Passover" (!!).

One famous sort-of-series during the 1950s involved a drunken stork, who would either be invited to drink with the new parents, or leave for his job directly from a roaring party. Since the stork would frequently be so smashed on the job, he'd deliver a baby (and at least once, a full-grown Bugs Bunny) to the wrong parents, with hilarious consequences.

It is worth to mention that on this cartoon a point was made about where do they get the babies: they're made in a factory.

The storks there are overworked and unable to make deliveries, in which other animals pitch in to deliver the babies, and end up sending them to the wrong animal.

In the Disney cartoon, Lambert the Sheepish Lion, the titular lion was supposed to go to Africa on a stork delivery (the same stork that appeared in Dumbo), but is taken in by a ewe after none of the lambs delivered to flock choose her to be their mother.

When Angelica asks the big question, her parents first start to tell her the truth (babies start out as tiny eggs), then chicken out and give the "stork" response. She relays this information to the babies, who are terrified that the eggs their dads are using to cook are "stork eggs" that they need to protect. The episode ends with Susie coming over and whispering to Angelica where babies really come from, but she doesn't seem to believe it.

The season 1 episode "Special Delivery" has the Stu receiving a baby doll in the mail. The babies mistake it for a real baby. Phil and Lil get into an argument on whether babies come for the stork or the store. Noticeably Chuckie states that his mom said that babies come from the hospital, when future episodes show his biological mother died when he was very young.

Apparently Ned Flanders of The Simpsons fame has never told his sons about the Birds and the Bees, as when he and his children stumble upon the evolution display in the museum the kids ask if Maude was an ape, causing him to get flustered. He hurriedly went on about God and a stork, resulting in the duo kneeling down and praying to the stuffed stork in the corner. Ned is not amused. Another episode revealed Maude and Ned Flanders made sure the doctor delivering their sons was actually called Dr. Stork, so technically they wouldn't be lying to their kids.

Parodied in one episode. The woman is waiting in bed when a large stork arrives with his little bundle. When he opens it, however, it is just a red light bulb that he puts in her lamp. She confused asks, "where's my baby?", to which he replies, in the mellow voice of Michael Clarke Duncan, "Sweetie, you and me are gonna make the baby." Then he turns on porn music and struts over to the bed...

Subverted in another episode, where Stewie is taken away from the Griffins because Child Services mistakenly thinks they're bad parents. When Chris sees people getting babies from a man behind a window, he asks if this is where babies come from. Brian deadpans that, yes, it is, prompting Chris to point an accusatory finger at Lois and shout "You told me I came out of your vagina!"

The cartoon Farm of Tomorrow has the narrator announce "we crossed a stork with a long-horn elk, to accommodate you impatient newlyweds who are in a hurry for a big family." The stork in question flies across the screen with a baby dangling from its bill. The stork also has a large rack of antlers, with a baby hanging from each point. See it here, at 5:30.

"Little Johnny Jet", a baby plane is delivered by a stork-like helicopter.

In Bonkers, Toon babies come from the stork, though Miranda's disbelief strongly implies this isn't true for Real babies.

Occurs humourously in Rocko's Modern Life. Rocko is driving Heffer and Filburt to Mrs. Hutchinson's birth in the hospital. While on the highway, they see the delivery stork's van (because all characters, including the stork, are Funny Animals) heading towards the hospital and race against the stork to reach the hospital first.

Subverted in a Bill Plympton short. A boy is told by his mother that he came from the stork. At which point, he imagines the stork coming to his house...and having sex with his mom.

The Disney short "Mickey's Nightmare" involved an Imagine Spot by Mickey Mouse about getting married to Minnie Mouse. He's out watering the garden, and a Delivery Stork drops a baby down the chimney. Then more arrive and do the same. He rushes in with Pluto to find Minnie lying in their bed, surrounded by a large number of baby mice, much to Mickey's dismay.

Nina Paley made a short, The Stork, using the theory to criticize global population trends.

In The Fairly OddParents! movie Abra Catastrophe, Timmy accuses his parents of always lying to him. In order to test this, they put on some home movies to see how long it takes for them to catch themselves fibbing. The first thing that comes up is them shouting "The stork!" at a younger Timmy.

Timmy's Dad: Wow, that was quick!

The 1958 Noveltoon short Stork Raving Mad has a stork trying to delivery a baby on rush delivery, but the baby he's carrying tries to stop him because it doesn't want to do what babies do, like take baths and eat castor oil.

In Moral Orel, Clay has a book called "Fake Facts of Life for Ages 5-15" that gives him varying responses of this trope's nature to give to a child, depending on the age of the child. The ones seen: babies are bowls of smiles that fell over in a garden, martians shot goo goo rays into mommy's tummy, fairies made them out of bubbles, they're made from skin that flaked off God's foot, babies are born when a stork gets pregnant, mommy swallowed a watermelon seed, and finally, God's chef injects mommies with his delicious glaze from his holy pastry bag. That last one has unforeseen consequences as Orel's told this story, thinks he's God's chef, and proceeds to impregnate the neighborhood women so he could masturbate and still go to heaven.

In the Invisible Network of Kids episode "Lovestruck Stinkbomb" the teacher Ms. Macbeth tries to teach the kids about love. Unfortunately, it seems nobody ever taught her about it because she tells them babies come from the stork. Then the kids tell her that's not right and that they come from cabbages.

A 1961 Paramount Modern Madcap had a lisping, kvetching stork ("I always get extra work!") having to deliver two babies—a human and a chimpanzee—to their respective families, but he accidentally switches them around. Hilarity ensues among the human father and the chimp baby.

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